passion: but Circe owns me, heart and soul, all
others I despise. Who could be lovelier than she?) What loveliness
had Ariadne or Leda to compare with hers? What had Helen to compare with
her, what has Venus? If Paris himself had seen her with her dancing
eyes, when he acted as umpire for the quarreling goddesses, he would have
given up Helen and the goddesses for her! If I could only steal a kiss,
if only I might put my arms around that divine, that heavenly bosom,
perhaps the virility would come back to this body and the parts, flaccid
from witchcraft would, I believe, come into their own. Contempt cannot
tire me out: what if I was flogged; I will forget it! What if I was
thrown out! I will treat it as a joke! Only let me be restored to her
good graces!

At rest on my pallet, night's silence had scarce settled down

To soothe me, and eyes heavy-laden with slumber to lull

When torturing Amor laid hold of me, seizing my hair

And dragging me, wounding me, ordered a vigil till dawn.

'Oh heart of stone, how canst thou lie here alone?' said the God,

'Thou joy of a thousand sweet mistresses, how, oh my slave?'

In disarrayed nightrobe I leap to bare feet and essay

To follow all paths; but a road can discover by none.

One moment I hasten; the next it is torture to move,

It irks me again to turn back, shame forbids me to halt

And stand in the midst of the road. Lo! the voices of men,

The roar of the streets, and the songs of the birds, and the bark

Of vigilant watch-dogs are hushed! Alone, I of all

Society dread both my slumber and couch, and obey

Great Lord of the Passions, thy mandate which on me was laid."

CHAPTER THE ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-NINTH.

(Such thoughts as these, of lovely Circe's charms so wrought upon my mind
that) I disordered my bed by embracing the image, as it were, of my
mistress, (but my efforts were all wasted.) This obstinate (affliction
finally wore out my patience, and I cursed the hostile deity by whom I
was bewitched. I soon recovered my composure, however, and, deriving
some consolation from thinking of the heroes of old, who had been
persecuted by the anger of the gods, I broke out in these lines:)

Hostile gods and implacable rate not me alone pursue;

Herakles once suffered the weight of heaven's displeasure too

Driven from the Inachian coast: Laomedon